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Poster:
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cashel |
Date:
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August 27, 2004 08:39:47am |
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Forum:
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prelinger
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Subject:
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a "coffee table" collection |
The collection was made for the "we got money , now lets show our kulture" people. In olden days, they were the people who bought books "by the yard with expensive bindings. The selection is weird. About a third of it is devoted to films of poor cinematic quality (why include the B-class rin tin feature or he poor adaption of wizard of oz.etc?).....revision heading
This post was modified by cashel on 2004-08-27 15:39:47
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Poster:
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 akb |
Date:
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August 29, 2004 07:38:45am |
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Forum:
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prelinger
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Subject:
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Re: a 'coffee table' collection |
I don't like the pricing either but I bet its not unreasonable given the costs of putting a good collection together and the very limited demand. Specialty items of high quality are always expensive, its unlikely that an unreasonable amount of profit is being made.
I think the real problem is that capitalist models are not sufficient to make this kind of material widely available. The state of affairs in the US is so bad that the Library of Congress has to
beg for very small amounts of money from corporate foundations to prevent early sound recordings from being lost. The LOC doesn't even have digital records of its
catalog before 1976. That is a very, very long way from Brewster's vision of every book in the LOC sitting in a storage array the size of a file cabinet.
It will take public funding to ensure our cultural heritage is preserved and made available to everyone. The only serious proposal in the US I have heard of is the
Digital Promise initiative, which would set aside $ billions from spectrum auctions for digitization efforts and other publicly beneficial education and cultural purposes. It was introduced in the US Congress (see the website for more details), ask your reps to support it.
This post was modified by akb on 2004-08-29 14:38:45
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